New answers tagged observer
1
This kind of question has a long and honorable history. As a young student, Einstein tried to imagine what an electromagnetic wave would look like from the point of view of a motorcyclist riding alongside it. But we now know, thanks to Einstein himself, that it really doesn't make sense to talk about such observers.
The most straightforward argument is ...
-1
The time wouldn't freeze. Instead, all events in the world will happen at the same time and place (from the viewpoint of the observer travelling at the light speed).
It would be better to say that the world (i.e. space & time) would collapse into single point.
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Hibernation is one way to freeze time,that is to arrive at future date,the natural way to time travel. Linear or circular movement at very high speed is the scientific theory to reach future.
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Our visible universe is made up of 3 dimensions of space and 1 dimension of time. All objects in the universe exist in this space-time continuum. Space and time are not 2 separate entities irrelative of each other. Space and time are intimately united as one entity called spacetime. As mentioned earlier, all stationery objects experience their time in this ...
2
This is essentially the same as lurscher's answer, but from a different perspective.
Special Relativity is often thought of as some kind of mystical force that acts on objects and stops them moving faster than light. This misconception is the reason for questions like this one. Special Relativity is actually just a prescription for telling us what events in ...
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The speed of light seems to be the undisputed speed limit of the universe, in relation to the fact that to travel faster than a massless photon is able to travel would not only be physically impossible because no object containing mass would be able to stand the blinding speed, even in the vacuum of space without atmosphere to create drag.
Also, there is ...
4
in relation to anything else that can make such measurements.
As the speed of light is universal, nothing can see any other massive field moving at the speed of light (which is reserved for massless fields)
your 0.51 number suggests that you expect that naive addition of velocities holds when velocities approach the speed of light. This is wrong. Here is ...
1
To add to Mark Eichenlaub's nice answer...
Suppose that in the Euclidean plane, you have two people, $P$ and $P'$, located at the same point (or as near as possible), but they're facing in different directions. Each of them imagines the usual Cartesian coordinate axes, say with $x$-axis to the direction they're facing, which we'll call depth.
Suppose also ...
0
What is the exact mechanism by which time dilates for a fast moving object?
There's no intuitive explanation nor any other special mechanism to describe SR effects other than the unification of spacetime. The view is completely based on its postulates. There's no absoluteness in time. There's no preferred reference frame meaning that every observer ...
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Your question is a natural one to ask, but it has no answer. It is a bit like asking by what mechanism the angles of a triangle always wind up adding to 180 degrees (in Euclidean geometry). There is no mechanism for that - no one is going around checking all the triangles to make sure their angles add up right. It is just a logical consequence of the theory ...
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A black hole won't form. The reason why is that the boosted particle is equivalent by a boost to a reference frame where there is no black hole, and the presence/abscence of a black hole is coordinate-independent. While the energy of, say, an object with Earth's density profile can be made arbitrarily large through a boost, the boosted Earth will still ...
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